On Optimizing the Arithmetic Precision of MCMC Algorithms

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is an ubiquitous stochastic method, used to draw random samples from arbitrary probability distributions, such as the ones encountered in Bayesian inference. MCMC often requires forbiddingly long runtimes to give a representative sample in problems with high dimensions and large-scale data. Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have proven to be a suitable platform for MCMC acceleration due to their ability to support massive parallelism. This paper introduces an automated method, which minimizes the floating point precision of the most computationally intensive part of an FPGA-mapped MCMC sampler, while keeping the precision-related bias in the output within a user-specified tolerance. The method is based on an efficient bias estimator, proposed here, which is able to estimate the bias in the output with only few random samples. The optimization process involves FPGA pre-runs, which estimate the bias and choose the optimized precision. This precision is then used to reconfigure the FPGA for the final, long MCMC run, allowing for higher sampling throughputs. The process requires no user intervention. The method is tested on two Bayesian inference case studies: Mixture models and neural network regression. The achieved speedups over double-precision FPGA designs were 3.5x-5x (including the optimization overhead). Comparisons with a sequential CPU and a GPGPU showed speedups of 223x-446x and 16x-18x respectively.